The Exit Option: Agency and Divorce in Late Eighteenth-Century America

Journal of Family History · 2024-08-09

Thousands of husbands placed advertisements in colonial newspapers announcing that their wives had deserted them and rejecting responsibility for their wives’ debts. Yet few scholars have studied “runaway wives.” This article argues the notices evidenced wives’ agency in a sexist and socially conservative eighteenth-century America, agency that took the form of “exit,” “voice,” and “loyalty,” to follow Hirschman's seminal work. The article examines the texts of almost four hundred listings and arbitrates between two explanations of this phenomenon: whether the notices were published to protect husbands financially or to effect common-law self-divorces. The husbands’ notices were predominantly acknowledgments of broken marriages.

The Insular Cases and the Emergence of American Empire

2024

• History
• Ancient history

American Political Development and the Recovery of a Human Science

Studies in American Political Development · 2022-08-26

Abstract Recent political developments point to the presence of grave problems with democratic governance in the United States. They suggest that scholarship in American political development (APD) could be better at studying the experiences and thinking of everyday Americans. APD scholars often study institutional changes, policy initiatives, and other shifts in governance without studying how these developments affect the lives of U.S. citizens and residents. And many developments of critical political importance are ignored or do not receive the scholarly attention they deserve. For our scholarship to do justice to the recent crises and better relate to the political world around us, as several recent past American Political Science Association (APSA) presidents have recommended, the article calls for APD scholarship to be better at focusing on people themselves: on their health and safety, their material standing, and their personal and social educations. By adding a fuller study of people to their research, APD scholars would be better equipped to identify important political developments that do not always capture the attention of Congress, the White House, and the media, but that are too important to ignore.

The Paradox of Power: Statebuilding in America, 1754–1920. By Ballard C. Campbell

Western Historical Quarterly · 2022

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Sociology

Shake Up the FCC

2021-09-30

Neoliberal economics have prevailed in the US news media since the time of Ronald Reagan. These policies have diminished the quantity and quality of independent, free-flowing political information and precipitated a great decline of local print and broadcast news, the control of cable and broadcast television by a precious few, and a dangerously concentrated system of digital media outlets. Although the Federal Communications Commission has justified this consolidation as furthering “market efficiency,” it has eroded citizens’ ability to govern themselves. As a result, the news less and less resembles a public good, one that establishes a common foundation for political action. Here, I propose a handful of reforms to ensure that the FCC serves the “public interest” per its original congressional mandate. I recommend that the FCC return to seven commissioners (from its current five members), as it was from 1934 until 1983, and that commissioners’ terms be lengthened from five to seven years. I also recommend that the Department of Justice use antitrust legislation to break up the largest media oligopolies (such as Comcast, NewsCorp, Google, and Facebook) and return to a policy of net neutrality.

Crossing Borders, Spanning Boundaries

Diplomatic History · 2020

• Humanities
• Computer Science
• History

Crossing Borders, Spanning Boundaries Katharine Bjork. Prairie Imperialists: The Indian Country Origins of American Empire. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. 340 pp. $55.00 (hardcover). Bartholomew H Sparrow Bartholomew H Sparrow Email: bhs@austin.utexas.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Diplomatic History, Volume 45, Issue 1, January 2021, Pages 199–200, https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhaa067 Published: 13 November 2020

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS: SPOTLIGHT ON PROMOTION LETTERS

PS Political Science & Politics · 2019-03-18 · 1 citations

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INTRODUCTION TO SPOTLIGHT ON PROMOTION LETTERS

PS Political Science & Politics · 2019-03-18

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The Other Point of Departure: Tocqueville, the South, Equality, and the Lessons of Democracy

Studies in American Political Development · 2019-09-10 · 2 citations

Democracy in America has greatly influenced not only how political scientists think of democratic government, political equality, and liberalism in general, but also how we think of the United States as a whole. This article questions Tocqueville's interpretations of Americans’ habits and beliefs, given how little time Tocqueville actually spent in the South and the near West and given that he all but ignored the founding of Virginia and the other colonies not settled by the Puritans and for religious reasons. Contrary to Tocqueville's emphasis on the Puritan “point of departure,” I use historical evidence from the U.S. Census, state constitutions, and historical scholarship on slave ownership, tenant farming, political participation, and the American colonies and the early United States to show the existence of hierarchy among white Americans, rather than the ubiquitous social and political equality among European Americans described by Tocqueville. His writings actually indicate an awareness of another American culture in the South and near West—one that disregards education, condones coarse manners, tolerates aggressive behavior, and exhibits unrestrained greed—but Tocqueville does not integrate these observations into his larger conclusions about Americans’ mœurs and institutions. Because of the existence of these important, non-Puritan habits, the political institutions Tocqueville sees as facilitating democracy in America and hopes to apply to France and Europe may not have the effects he believes they will have.

Becoming an American Empire

2019-01-01

Reviewing: Adam Burns, American Imperialism: The Territorial Expansion of the United States; Paul Frymer, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion